PODCAST| Angelo Acerbi interviews Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley, directors of the film Permanent Green Light.

To listen to the interview, click on the ► icon on the right, just above the picture

Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley unite their creativity on a project that stays in the realm of Cooper’s tradition but takes a step back from the queer side of it to show the infinite discomfort teenagers suffer and the lack of answers to their needs. Inspired by real events that happened to an Australian teen, Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley tell us about the philosophy of Permanent Green Light’s  narrative and the experience of working on a super-tight budget in a short time with non-actors kids, building up a team for a common goal.

Permanent Green Light: Roman is a teenager who is planning to blow himself up in public. He has no terrorist aims: this act will be his last and shocking attempt to escape from the empty life that awaits him in the future and to overcome the depression that grips him. He is surrounded by alienating suburbs, where apathetic young people are apparently detached from reality. With them he creates a group aimed at self-detonation. The acclaimed (and controversial) American writer Dennis Cooper, together with video artist Zac Farley (with whom he had previously worked on the feature film Little Cattle Towards Glory), brings to the big screen the disturbed and disturbing universe which is a feature of his books. The starting point of the film is a real event: the accidental death of an Australian teenager who declared himself a jihadist and blew himself up in a failed terrorist attack. Cooper and Farley turn this little-known, tragic anecdote into a contemporary parable, where a spectacular and deliberately chosen death seems to be the only way to fill the void of a purposeless life.